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Thursday February 14, 2013 5:24 AM

SEATTLE (AP) — A Seattle barista says it was all satirical, but his anonymous blog that made
snarky comments about his boss and the customers he didn’t like got him fired.

Matt Watson was exposed as the author of the blog “Bitter Barista” this week by another coffee
site called Sprudge.com, which led his boss at All City Coffee in Seattle’s Georgetown neighborhood
to fire him,
The Seattle Times reported on Tuesday.

In the blog, the 30-year-old wrote:

• “If you remind me four times that you’ve ordered decaf, guess what you won’t be getting … .
"

• “I would remember your usual drink if you were a more memorable person.”

• “I like to use a lot of big words when I tweet, that way if my boss ever finds my Twitter
account, he won’t understand any of it.”

Watson said his blog was satire and he was just accentuating the “5 percent who I guess make our
job more difficult and don’t treat us as human beings.”

“I had a good personal relationship with 95 percent of customers,” he said. Watson added that he
thought very highly of his boss, Seth Levy.

Watson said baristas are “probably an artist, overqualified, people with pretty much college
education across the board.”

The New Jersey native said he has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and moved to Seattle “
following a girl.”

He worked at All City Coffee to make ends meet while pursuing a career as a hip-hop artist under
the moniker Spekulation. On his site, Watson has released several songs.

Watson started his Bitter Barista blog about two weeks ago, and it was getting a couple of
thousand hits a day. He made no mention of All City Coffee or his real name on the site. But the
operators of Sprudge.com put it together after Watson said what he was doing in his Spekulation
tweets,
The Seattle Times reported.

Sprudge.com outed Watson a week ago: “There’s a lot of anger in this blog, and while we love the
well-worn barista cliche, it should be the stuff of mild parody, not an all-out assault on whomever
walks through the door of your cafe.”

The Times said Watson emailed Levy, saying: “This isn’t bad press, it’s actually really
good press … especially given your customer base and the type of neighborhood that Georgetown has
become … it could turn out to be a fun something that gives the place a little spike in
publicity."

Levy didn’t see it that way.

“He was writing about his boss during business hours,” Levy said. “I represent the business, the
customers and the staff. I can’t endorse what he was saying, whether humorous or not. It puts me in
a difficult position, where if I don’t respond that means I endorse what he’s saying.”